I threw in the towel on the rat catching after I was awakened at 3:45 AM by a terrible racket under my bed. It was so loud I thought it was in my room, but when I turned on the lights, I could see it wasn’t. The scrabbling went on and on, so I finally had to move into the guest bedroom. In the morning I decided to finally rid the house of this dirty rat, or rats.

A.I. gave me all the instructions. Bait a rat trap but don’t set it. Let the rat eat the peanut butter all it wants for several days until it feels totally comfortable and then set the trap. It all made perfect sense except for the instructions as to where to put these traps. I decided I needed a professional so called a company called BugMaster.

A very nice woman named Chantal came and immediately found the grease trail the rats had left so she saw exactly where they were coming in. She then checked the perimeter of the house and showed me areas where they could get in and told me what to do. Then she did as A.I. said, she baited two traps and said for me to set them in a few days.

I do hope to God the traps work as I hate living with rats. I’ve also had it with the ants as yesterday my dining room lights wouldn’t work. I called the electrician and he said he’s never seen anything like it. As soon as he began unscrewing the light switch ants came pouring out. The ants also break my air conditioner every couple of years by living in the connection box.

As you may know by now Calvin’s sweet orange tabby cat Felix never came home again, presumably eaten by coyotes which live next door in the field. A neighbour said her cat was bitten by one right in front of her and then died.

For the last two weeks a raccoon has been breaking into the chicken run, and it’s killed two of my hens, Jennifer and Heather. And the awful thing about raccoons is they only tear the crop out of the hen, leaving the entire rest of the bird. What a waste of lovely chicken. As the garbage truck had just gone, I had to bag the hens and put their carcasses in the freezer until this week.

I hired my neighbour to top the chicken run with wire, so now it might be somewhat harder for that raccoon to bust in. I’d like to complete the job with a line of electrical wiring across the top but doubt that’s possible as when I explained that to the electrician, he was puzzled and asked, “what kind of a wire are you thinking of?” This gave me the hint either he’s not the man for this, or that I’ve once again asked for something completely insane.

Sure, I find it interesting to live as though I’m a pioneer breaking trails and slashing the forest to make a clearing and build a home. However, I live a ten-minute drive from downtown Kelowna so sometimes find it a bit overwhelming to have to shop for services or products that will protect me from wild critters.

The nice woman from BugMaster said getting rid of the ants will be around $500 this fall and the same again in the spring, so on top of annoyance there are large costs associated with pest removal. But what can ya do? I can’t leave the ants and rats to completely destroy my house.

Well never mind, I’m finally doing something about it all, so I have to cut myself some slack.